Rice Football fell behind early and never caught up, making the candy on the concourse the only treat to be seen in a Halloween loss to Memphis at home.
Before the costume-clad onlookers had put a dent into their recently acquired candy prizes, Rice football had been spooked into a massive early deficit. Five straight drives without a first down, combined with a ruthless Memphis offense put the Owls far from contention with more than a half of football still to play. Things would get better, but that rough open proved to be too tall a mountain to climb.
“When we do settle in and we can find the answers, we can get it going. But when you’re being 21-0 because you didn’t get it going early enough and we didn’t maybe tackle as well as we needed to earlier on then you’re playing a whole different game and a game we’re not built for,” Rice football head coach Scott Abell admitted. “We’re not built for that and that really put our guys in a tough situation from there on out.”
Here are a few immediate reactions from the game:
Tackling Troubles
In his midweek media availability, Rice football head coach Scott Abell began his list of keys to the game with this declaration: “We’re going to have to be great tacklers.”
It was particularly disheartening, then, when a Rice tackler met a Memphis receiver behind the line of scrimmage on the Tigers’ first offensive play and was unable to bring him down. Rice should have at least been in second and long. Instead, the receiver broke the tackle and scampered for 12 yards and a first down.
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A few players later, Memphis quarterback Brendon Lewis was hit on a designed quarterback run but didn’t stop running until he stood in the endzone, scorer of the game’s first points. That wouldn’t be the last time Lewis pushed past contact in the redzone for a big gain. On the Tigers’ fourth possession, Lewis avoided multiple rushers in the backfield and scampered for 16 yards instead of a loss.
“We were there to make the play,” senior linebacker Andrew Awe said, summarizing the woeful defensive start. “didn’t make the tackle.”
The disparity of talent on the field on Friday night was notable, particularly when it came to the trenches, but tackling would likely fall in the category of Abell’s TNT (Take No Talent) plays. And there were certainly players schemed up to make plays. They just didn’t get made.
“Close” on Offense Doesn’t Count for Points
Nine games in, there’s been enough output from this offense that a sluggish start shouldn’t serve as a death knell for a game’s worth of output. More than once, the Owls have iterated through failed efforts only to finally land on an effective solution to move the ball down the field. To some degree, that’s what happened in this game, however the length of the sputtering start proved way too much to overcome.
Rice football tallied negative two yards on its first five drives, generating a decent amount of effective first down runs before negative plays on second down put the team behind the chains and rendered a positive first step. Their next drive went 78 yards on 12 plays and ended in the endzone. After a three-and-out to start the second half, they engineered a 14-play, 37-yard drive that nearly produced points.
On the three drives in which the offense produced at least one first down, they racked up 191 total yards and average 5.0 yards per play. Their other seven drives, excluding their final drive with Jenkins removed from the game, went for 13 total yards and averaged 0.6 yards per play.
Abell, I believe correctly, pointed to second down failures. The offense was relatively successful on first down, but stumbled on their second play, leading to hard to convert third and longs. Turn some of those second down losses into three yard gains and the results could look quite different.
“We were pretty good on first down tonight,” Abell said. “Second down I’m thinking we were abysmal, which puts you behind the chains and makes third down really tough. The third down numbers aren’t always because of the third down, its sometimes the down leading up to it and I think that’s what we’ll find tonight.”
Two total scores is a failure for this offense. Full stop. But the questions should revolve around their overall lack of yards, rather they should start with how can this offense be more consistent on those base down opportunities to avoid low-percentage third down opportunities. When they get moving, they usually get the job done.
Self-Inflicted Mistakes
In their upset of UConn six days prior, Rice football committed one penalty. It was a false start that proved largely insignificant in the scope of the game. Five penalty yards won’t swing many games. 78 penalty yards, though?
Compounding their tough start on offense and defense were a series of mental mistakes that made a bad situation worse. The Owls were flagged for fair catch kick interference (twice!) and roughing the passer, all in the first half. When the roughing call was made, Rice had accumulated 43 yards of penalties and negative two yards of total offense. Memphis was on its way to a fourth touchdown drive in its first five possessions.
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The penalties were problematic, but there are more than a few execution miscues that Rice football will have more frustration with when it comes time to turn on the film.
While attempting to mount a comeback in the second half, Jenkins failed to connect with a streaking Landon Ransom down the near sideline. A few plays later he lofted a ball just out of the reach of Quinton Jackson in the endzone. The drive ended with an interception on third and 35 on a ball deflected into the air by a receiver. Last week against UConn, Rice hauled in those passes. This time they didn’t.
Not Shying Away from the “B” Word
Less than an hour removed from a one-sided loss, Abell closed his press conference with an honest, bold assessment. “We’re now down to a three-game season,” he said. “We’ve got some goals. A goal set out to start the season to make ourselves bowl eligible is very much in front of us.”
Bowl?
In the many conversations I’ve had with Abell, both with a microphone and podium set up and casually chatting with no recorders rolling, Abell had yet to acknowledge that bowl eligibility was a stated goal for this season. And than that, Abell confided on Friday he reminded the team of that in the locker room following their fifth loss of the year.
With that margin thinning and Rice needing to win two of their three remaining games to secure eligibility, Abell isn’t backing down.
“That’s a goal. I don’t hide from it. We got three games left and they’re tough. The challenges are ahead of us, right? But, I think this is a very capable team when it all comes together and we play well,” he said.
“I’m excited for the challenge ahead of us. We’ll take it one game at a time. We got to figure out how to go 1-0 each week, and that will be our challenge this week. But the players, they know that’s a goal of ours. If you don’t speak your goals, they don’t come into existence. That opportunity is out there. It’s up to us to go capitalize on it.”
Translating the team that took the field on Friday into a bowl-caliber squad seems like a tough task, but Abell’s the kind of guy who was hired to make the impossible become possible. He’s got his hands full, but if we learned anything about this team in between the UTSA loss and this one, there’s some gold in there somewhere. Abell just has to find it before his team is trailing by three scores.
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